Apple's push notification service to send data in messages: this does not work in the iPhone simulator. I can't play video in Apple's simulator. Also there's no hardware acceleration in it, so I can't use [a standard for high performance graphics] in it.

But I can test my games in the Microsoft simulator. All of this, plus other stuff from Microsoft, make the overall experience much smoother.

What else is a plus for WP7?

With an iPhone application, you can make great-looking app, in short amount of time, but that's something which takes quite a bit of skill. The entire process [including publishing and distribution] is incredibly frustrating: there are speed bumps and roadblocks and all kinds of things that will slow you down, especially in large development teams.

But from what I can tell [at this early stage], Microsoft's experience of getting your app into their pipeline is significantly easier. They had a on the pipeline for publishing a product. Assuming they deliver on that, there's a drastic number of steps that have been removed from what you see in today's iPhone life cycle.